Ibis
by Whyagain
Summary: This week on XF3 - Ibis: Mulder and Scully reunited. Then Marita and Spender part ways. Chapters 16 and 17 up. Stay tuned because up next: Meet the Rebel Delegation and unravel the mysteries of crop circles. -colonization; post-series; ensemble; WIP-
1. 1 Prologue

**Title: **Ibis**  
Author: **Whyagain**  
Classification: **Colonization, Adventure, Romance (eventually)**  
Rating:** T or PG-13 for language**  
Spoilers:** Everything is fair game.**  
Feedback: **Please.**  
Disclaimer:** I think it is already abundantly clear, but I don't own these characters, nor do I benefit monetarily from their appearances here. No infringement intended.  
**Summary:** "She had not only gotten into bed with the devil, she had slit his throat and taken his throne." Catches up with and follows our ensemble of heroes (and villains) in their fight for survival.  
***NEW*  
****Relationship Tags:** MSR, DSR UST, DRR UST, Spender/Marita (yeah, I'm going there. sue me.)

**A/N:** By way of information, I've wanted to write a colonization story for well over ten years and, having only recently fallen back into the fandom, was compelled again. I hope to finish by December 22, of course, seeing as it will be the end of the world. This is not an AU piece, everything is canon, except for the deaths of Alex Krycek and the LGM. I also anticipate longer chapters once the players are established.

* * *

He was blind.

It was the only thing he could convince his mind to accept as truth as he stumbled on atrophied legs into the frigid daylight. He shielded his dark-adjusted eyes against the painful onslaught of the white world. Acres of snow and rime-adorned conifers blended perfectly into a uniformly cloud-covered, stark sky. The links and poles and curling barbed wire of a fifteen-foot double fence encased a bleak gray stone building, edges barely coalescing out of the neve.

Prison, he remembered.

His prison for upwards of three years.

Had it been that long? Days and weeks and months clashed together in a haze of torment, the nuances and routine of the passage of time lost within the more persistent thundering of physical traumas and mental tortures, the only telltale sign being the steady growth of his matted hair.

He'd lost everything for duty. The rancor and rage in his soul seethed beneath the surface as the memories returned and for a moment he thought he would have launched himself into the hunt for the duplicitous parties, but for his broken body.

They had lied.

He could have understood, would have given himself up willingly to preserve his honor, if they had but asked-commanded, even. Every fiber of his being was trained to take orders without question, without fail, but they had lied.

The prison had not been a POW camp, not some foreign backwater slum or terrorist jail. Every demand was made in perfect English. The other prisoners, while he did not recognize their faces, he recognized their souls as well as their wounds. They were all soldiers, dying like animals sent to slaughter by their creators, by the men who were supposed to safeguard their honor.

That betrayal was the worst.

He was willing to wager the rest of his battered life upon the fact that they were trying to build a better soldier, a better weapon. The best of the best, men who had seen every sort of battlefield and had survived a brush will Hell itself, were collected at the prison, the testing meant to prolong and pronounce what nature and experience had already cemented in them.

But had they succeeded or failed?

And why was he suddenly free?

His mind flickered the warning that this might be another test, another trick. What useless treachery. Every damn piece of his life already in ruins and this was the game they chose to play? He felt the last howl of a cornered predator determined to go down fighting at the back of his throat.

But he heard whispers from all sides, whispers cloaked in tattered disbelief and threadbare fear, whispers that held a sliver of hope, which was more than he had felt in three years.

He staggered into a man, then another and then three more, all looking as drawn and waxen as the slush beneath their feet, their pasty complexions bleeding confusingly into their shapeless slate potato-sack tunics. A sea of a hundred or more bodies and they were all turned, pallid faces wearing the expressions of men who have seen God and the Mother Mary and all the choirs of angels. He followed their uniform line of sight.

She stood on what looked at first glance to be a bank of firn, but when he moved closer he realized it was actually the cold steel of a raised dais. Her eyes were as achromatic as the landscape, but her hair-her hair was fire itself, whipped into life by the gelid gale that rattled his bones. She was speaking, her cerise lips flowing liquidly around her oration, but the sounds would not carry to his ears.

He surged forward, pushing through the crowd of emaciated men, to stand at the foot of what had once been a loading platform in time to discern the only sentence of her rostrate address he needed to hear.

"I know what you are."

Shock and skepticism and instinctual suspicion warred in his mistreated mind, but the conviction behind her words was the only promise his soldier's heart needed. Bound in that instant, he would follow her to the end of the world.


	2. 2 Marshall

The director was under extremely explicit, albeit predominately vague, instructions from his government, but Marshall thought the abrupt appearance of an armed contingent of four very American marines in his Canadian hospital was pushing the octogenarian's generally expansive tolerance.

He watched her freeze, her hand stalled in the middle of a cursive "s" as she absorbed their soot-covered clothing and weapons. He instantly read the order behind her steely gaze when her eyes flickered to his.

Marshall rose from his seat in the back of the room, crossing the meeting space in a collection of rigid paces.

"Sir." The commander saluted, his training ingrained even after years of following a new truth.

"Outside," Marshall growled with a backwards glance towards the collection of agape hospital administrators.

The conference room down the hall was blessedly empty and he hastily gestured the four soldiers inside.

"What in the hell do you think you're doing?" The door lock had barely fallen into place before his brusque whisper chastised the group.

"Sir," the commander stumbled, his purpose lost somewhere between dishonor and fright. Marshall growled even as he realized they hadn't known. She told them they could reach her at this address in a dire emergency, but she had never specified and they obviously hadn't expected to find themselves surrounded by ignorance wearing civilian clothing no less.

The click of heels down the sterilized hallway silenced the man's stutters. Marshall unlocked the door, admitting a petite doctor, her hair color a sudden match for her ire.

"Someone better be dead," she intoned to the group, the crunching rumble of ice grating against ice.

The commander handed her a clasped envelope.

"We thought you'd want to know immediately, ma'am," he ventured.

She opened the manilla sleeve, not taking her eyes from the squirming commander, until glossy photographs emerged from beneath the paper. She studied the first grainy black and white image, then the second and then the third, her body locked. She was so intent on the last picture, her face as blank as a porcelain mask, that he wasn't sure the susurrant query was hers.

"Where?"

"Just east of Cottbus on the Polish boarder."

"When?"

"Two days ago, ma'am. 0200 CEST."

Marshall met her eyes, a tumult of emotion spilling over, which she quickly stifled. He was too used to her practiced facade, her glassy self-possession, that this jarring momentary slip could mean only one thing.

"Alopex?" he murmured.

"Get me the Rat," she demanded, her tone the quiet promise of a hunt. 


	3. 3 Krycek

The visitation was unprecedented.

He felt a calculating smile curl around his lips as he studied the woman in front of him.

The pictures she brought were not surprising. Mulder always had a distinct knack for finding the most inconvenient sources for his information. Why the man was still playing the ghost, chasing after UFOs and breaking into military installations, was a mystery, especially in light of the iron-fisted rule his skeptic partner had instituted in his name.

Mulder already knew the truth, but it was one thing to believe and another to fight the future. It would seem his pretty partner was better at the latter.

"This," he said, tapping the photograph, "is Reishland."

His smile grew as her expression hardened. She knew he was toying with her. Good. Necessity might have had the biggest hand in assigning him to his current enterprise, but he knew she would trade the intelligence network he spent years building for his head on a pike if he failed in this task.

"Top-secret, highest level of security. Even I might have a hard time getting a man out."

It was more or less the truth. Reishland was all but impenetrable simply because no one had any reason to attempt it. Half prison and half laboratory, it was just one of a number of cages in which the Germans housed their human guinea pigs, nothing more.

"Cut the crap, Krycek."

God, he missed her voice. He had forgotten how much. Dripping with severity, judgment coiled itself around her words with the finality of a gavel. The velvet carpet and upholstered walls of his comfortable office only enhanced the effect.

He leaned over his cherry desk, his eyes locked on hers.

"Beg."

Her bodyguard surged to his feet, but Alex only leaned back in his chair and barked a mocking laugh.

"Who's this? Do you have a cute pet name for him, as well? Maybe the Rhino? or the Dinosaur? All muscles and no brains," Alex sneered.

He watched her lay a hand on the soldier's arm, the gesture unnecessary in light of the clear signals screaming from her eyes. Maybe it was for his benefit, to distract from the fact that she had clearly learned how to speak soldier. He rather thought the Snake would be pleased if he could see his former underling communicate in fluent, tacit marine.

"The Alopex, the Cheiracanthium-and I'm the Rat. How very creative."

Her expression never faltered, but he could read the surprise in her eyes well enough.

"Tell me, how is Marita, anyway? I miss those vacant baby blues."

He was aware of her internal struggle as the impulse to strike him battled with the urge to retort, but both actions would serve only to confirm things she would rather he not know. She learned her lessons at the FBI well, and he had the sneaking suspicion that her soldier friends she liberated from the Russian testing facility all those years ago had only honed those skills.

He watched her jaw work, the muscles refusing to provide him anything.

"We prefer the Spider," she finally forced through her teeth. "Easier to spell."

"You did us all a disservice, turning her into an assassin. She was dangerous enough without knowing all the ways to kill a man."

Her contempt was beautiful. It oozed out of her very being, her moral soul which hated everything about the game she now controlled. She had not only gotten into bed with the devil, she had slit his throat and taken his throne. Every scrupulous cell in her body shrieked in suffering for the wrongness of the power she was forced to wield. But she was trapped, just as he was, just as they all were, by the fight for survival.

She produced a slip of paper with a day, time and flight number penned in her neat hand.

"He will be on this flight."

Alex fought the yearning to teach her some humility. Give a woman the reigns of the world and the fate of all mankind, and she devolves into an arrogant bitch. But the craving died quickly in light of the facts.

Scully was after all the lynchpin in this resurrected consortium.

And the date was fast approaching.

He stuffed the scrap of paper into his pocket.

"At your service, my lady Ibis."


	4. 4 Doggett

He brushed the lacquered oak grain of his new desk with a feather touch.

Eight years.

She did this in eight years.

He took a few measured steps around the office. A glossy stock photo of the president, an F-16 Fighting Falcon, and an American flag in a brass stand were aligned with military precision. A pair of tanned leather armchairs sat opposite a matching oak coffee table. Slatted blinds opened on a wide view of Arlington, white headstones blazing under the sun. The carpet was embossed with the emblem of the National Guard.

The four stars pinned to his uniformed shoulders felt heavy, felt like the weight of 311 million American lives. The Department of Defense badge fastened to his lapel felt like something else entirely.

His personal assistant entered, his hands full with a file box which he placed on the desk without shifting the desk pad.

"Sir, this arrived for you this morning." Henderson handed him a thick manilla envelope and exited the room.

He wandered over to his desk and riffled through the contents of the box. Bits of metal, a hand-painted globe in a brass setting, his favorite mug. A spinning desk ornament from Monica, the ballpoint pen from his NYPD captain, a picture of Jenny, Mark and Matthew. His certificates and diplomas. He set out each item reverently, placing them with the practiced eye of a soldier. He set the framed items aside, making a mental note to have Henderson hang them.

The thought brought him back to the envelope.

Breaking the seal, he withdrew a framed image of the Apollo 11 logo, a sticky note affixed to the corner of the glass.

"No one gets there alone," it read in a familiar feminine hand.

Henderson was not an officer, but he was the perfect assistant. Punctual, discrete and dependable, Doggett added "adept spy" to the list.

He knew she had a hundred more qualified men at her disposal, but the fact that she chose him for this position, the extra effort it took to push him through the requisite promotions and hearings, ultimately culminating in his appointment as Chief of the National Guard Bureau, illuminated with blinding clarity her faith in him, not to mention the importance of his success.

He remembered their last meeting down to the forest green of her blouse and the burnished gold of her ball earrings, the lingering smell of lilac, the soft light of her empty apartment deepening every hue until he wasn't sure if he was dreaming.

"So you understand we can't meet again after this. You won't see anyone."

He had had such a difficult time separating her reality from his first impressions. That first meeting at the FBI, she was the antithesis of every ordered existence, openly flouting commands, pure contempt rolling off of her in waves. He hadn't realized all the assumptions he made about her from that first act of defiance. He hadn't realized her devotion went all the way to her bones, that the loss of her job, her career, her good name, even her life were all secondary to the loss of her partner. He hadn't realized a lot of things back then.

"When the date comes, I trust you'll know what to do."

She had just been so broken. After the rage, after the tears, after he finally gave up thinking she should be committed and finally understood the rigid role she was trying to play, he couldn't see anything but the pain. The loss stemmed from a place he recognized, a place he knew from bitter experience. And he knew how easy it would be for her to lose herself.

He just had no way of knowing that her rock bottom was so far from her peak.

"John, there's one more thing."

Looking back, he could pinpoint the exact moment when he first perceived the real power Dana Scully held. Mulder's disappearance had forced Doggett to get inside his head, to understand the man and his motives. So when, after his son was born, Mulder vanished, leaving his partner and newborn child, he wasn't just shocked. He wasn't just dumbfounded. He absolutely could not accept those actions as willful behavior of the man he knew. All the rules Mulder broke all his life, all the authority he contravened, all the advice he failed to observe-all the things he would do, the men he would kill, the lengths he would go to get what he wanted, and someone got to him? Someone scared Fox Mulder enough to go into hiding? It was not unacceptable; it was unfathomable.

But she convinced him. Somehow, she persuaded the most brash man in the world to do everything against his character.

For her.

When she handed him a picture of a shy blonde with a round, gentle face and sympathetic blue eyes in her thirties, he almost laughed, could almost make a joke out of every high-wrought plan she wanted to make him a part of.

"Her name is Jenny. She needs to be your wife."

He tried to explain to her then, tried to express everything he felt in a bubbling rush. He would do anything she needed, take any job, give any order. He would live the rest of his life without seeing her again, just not this. He couldn't have known that Jenny would be the perfect wife and give him two beautiful sons, but even if he had somehow, he would still have fought.

If he lived a thousand years he would not forget her smile that day.

"You want to save the world, John. This is the price."

At that moment, he envied Fox Mulder more than any man on the planet. 


	5. 5 Marita

It was half an accident she even noticed the name; her Cantonese was not that good.

It took two days to get to Singapore without detection and another three days of canvasing. Of all the ways this was a bad idea, the foremost was, assuming she successfully sprung her prisoner and somehow got him back to the US, she had no inkling of how her present would be received.

Scully had certainly not been pleased with the ears of the contacts she was supposed to have prevailed upon.

Win some. Lose some.

Besides, breaking into prisons was always more fun than trying to build an Asian syndicate and no one would be put out if she happened to leave a few bodies lying around.

The soft-soled leather of her boots gripped the gray stone dividing wall in the surveillance's blind spot as she scaled it and approached the first guard post. Mr. Yam of first watch always nodded off when the infomercials started advertising orange spray tan. She used the distraction to slip through the double fences surrounding the main building.

Not even electrified.

She knew the security would be lax, but this was laughable. Did they expect to hold anyone?

A quick lock-pick and a piece of electrical tape over the alarm trigger admitted her to the cell block. She couldn't trust the men to keep quiet while she searched. She ran her fingers over her latest toy with a touch of fondness. The size of a clementine, the little silver ball would knock out a room in two minutes. Unfortunately, it meant her prey would also be incapacitated, but if what she heard about him was true, she would have no trouble moving him. As soon as she heard bodies drop to the floor, she counted to twenty and opened the steel-core door.

The smell alone was an excellent motivation for her quick departure. Thirty-odd men were stuffed into each twenty-by-twenty cell. Urine, fecal bits and other waste ran fluid in open rivulets across the floor, small trough-like depressions in the concrete ground guiding them to trenches outside the walls. Flies and mosquitos, seemingly unaffected by the knockout gas, swarmed her as she searched each cell.

Finally, in the last cell in the back, she found her quarry.

He was small, smaller than she remembered, his face and skin twisted inhumanly around his frame. The prosthetics described to her must have been peeled away, lost in his journey to incarceration. He was literally a man without a face.

The irony of the situation did not escape her as she made quick work of the barred door and hoisted him over her shoulders. Despite his deformities, he was still too heavy for her to carry far. Luckily, he would wake up within twenty minutes.

She toted him back across the yard and through the fences. He gave a grunt as she threw him over the dividing wall. She recalled the last time she broke a man out of a dirty foreign prison. It had been Alex Krycek and she had been less happy about that order than this favor. She considered there might be advantages to her former life: She hadn't had to drag Alex out by his tattered clothing in the middle of the night.

Nostalgia shifted in her mind as she sat her liberated captive upright against the low wall. It would be easier to wait for him to wake; they were in relatively little danger here for the time being.

She remembered every white glare, every water-stained ceiling tile, every acrid scent of that hospital. She remembered every injection, every scan, every pain. Almost a year of her life, and it all melded together in a haze of medical tortures.

The more she considered it, and she had spent more time thinking about it than was psychologically healthy, she started to describe it as mental rape. The black oil intruder had been relentlessly cruel, stealing her faculties and her consciousness, taunting and twisting every fear, until she wasn't sure which dark thoughts had been hers and which had been planted within her.

The vaccines weren't worse, but they weren't better. The tremors, the shakes, the nausea, chills and sweats-the hallucinations were the worst. Unreal, apocalyptic images played across her injured mind of ancient worlds burning to the ground and monsters roaming the earth.

And then there was Jeffery Spender.

Jeffery Spender arrived like a life buoy, bobbing and unsteady, cast about by the waves of a game he couldn't see from beneath the waterline, Jeffery Spender who offered to help her in return for the life of his mother, Jeffery Spender who was intent on saving the world but didn't quite know where to begin.

A groan startled her and she quickly clamped a hand over his slit of a mouth. Listening intently, she could hear no one and she relaxed her grip.

"Who the-where-" The broken man tried to stand, but collapsed, head falling into his hands. He peered at her through wounded dark eyes.

"Marita? Marita Covarrubias?"

She grinned involuntarily before helping him to his feet and steering him towards her concealed vehicle. He was blessedly quiet, hopefully pondering his good fortune rather than the likely outcome of his future. She settled him in the passenger's seat before climbing in herself.

"I feel like I just fell down the rabbit hole," she heard him mutter as she navigated through the woods.

"That's a nice description for a pit of a Singapore prison."

His throat gurgled and for an unreal moment she thought it was a laugh. But he did not repeat the action. He just stared at his scarred hands under the moonlight flickering through the trees.

"Mulder."

"Sorry?" She turned onto the access road that led to the highway.

"Fox fucking Mulder," he intoned again. "He put me in that hellhole."

She snorted. "You cost him his son. What did you think he'd do?"

The possible ramifications of his statement sunk in only a moment later. So, he had seen Mulder. The fact that he had been stuck in such an inhumane place by a justice-oriented person suggested Mulder not only knew about the magnetite, but knew about the duplicitous actions he had taken to administer it.

A regular Cain and Able, both out to destroy their father's legacy, but destroying each other instead.

"I expected him to understand," he growled. "I gave him a gift." He slammed his palms against the dashboard, knocking the glove compartment open in his fury. "I told him how to find William again!"

She never considered that paying her life-debt to Spender would conflict with her life-debt to Mulder. The notion set her teeth on edge. It seemed she was owing more men than she could pay.

Outside the trees thinned and gave way to scattered fields and buildings.

"Why are you doing this?"

She felt a smile rise around her mouth. "You saved me once, remember? I'm just returning the favor." She felt her amusement fade. "But I doubt you'll like where we're headed," she added, considering it only fair to warn him.

It was hard to tell, but she conjectured his look was grim with understanding.

"The Ibis is very angry with you, Jeffy." 


	6. 6 Marshall

He triple-checked the translation, but the string of Navajo consonant sounds would not resolve into good news. Clutching the transmission in his fist, he considered waiting until her conference call with Doctor Caulder was finished, but quickly rejected the idea. She might need the help of the three Aposematics and the best time to contact them was always during the weekly scrambled calls.

A curt knock admitted him to the lab. The old virologist's magnified face stared down at him in mild surprise from the projector screen.

"Oh, hullo Murphey," the doctor's voice rattled from the speakers.

Familiar irritation spiked through him. Almost eight years of weekly research sessions, months of laboratory construction at the base, not to mention all the signed memos and requests, and the extreme expert, forerunning pioneer, altogether genius scientist still couldn't remember his name.

With a quick glance, Marshall watched her pen hesitate over her notes.

"Excuse me, Dr. Caulder. We'll have to cut this week short, I'm afraid."

"Yes, yes. Next Thursday then, Dana," said the image, which disappeared as she shut down the projector.

He crossed the room and disconnected her cordless microphone, but left the computer running.

"Krycek's man put Mulder on the plane at 0700 this morning, but when it landed stateside in Charlotte, he wasn't there. The men I sent to meet him reported no one matching Mulder's description was seen exiting the craft or the airport and none of his aliases booked another flight."

She passed a hand over her face. "Did we have anything but Krycek's word that he was on the plane to begin with?"

He hesitated. The real answer was no, but seeing as she spent the better part of two days traveling to and from the Rat's lair in Kitzbehel plus the extra security she arranged for the flight, there should have been no possibility Krycek would refuse.

"There's a chance the Spider had someone in Berlin."

The Spider was not known for her punctuality or her reliability when it came to anything but confirmed body counts.

She shook her head, eyes slipping shut.

"Frohike, did you hear any of that?" She addressed herself to the computer.

A moment later a window winked into life, filled with the startled expression of Melvin Frohike.

"You know we don't spy on your calls, Scully." The hacker grinned into the camera.

"Only 'cause that Caulder is the most boring man on the planet," came a voice from the background.

She ignored him. "Any chance that flight was intercepted?"

Frohike's eyebrows climbed over the rims of his glasses. "Flight number?"

"1121 International out of Berlin."

His face vanished from the screen and a small scuffle over the possession of a keyboard could be heard.

Marshall took the intermission to study the latest round of vaccination test results. Her inability to refine the solid state form of the vaccine was not surprising, but it was inconvenient. The vaccine had to be injected, which made mass distribution a nightmare. She and Doctor Caulder had managed early on to extend the shelf life by almost five years, but even with the quantities of vaccine stocked in strategic positions around the country, the cover story allowing for expeditious inoculation of every member of the US and Canada, not to mention the rest of the world, would be flimsy at best. They didn't have the time or the resources for anything more plausible.

But that was not his department.

"Nada," Frohike's voice drug him back to the present. "Nothing on navy radar, nothing on satellite. By all accounts that plane made a nonstop flight from Berlin to North Carolina. No interruptions-terrestrial or extraterrestrial."

She braced her hands on the obsidian countertop.

"This is interesting, though. There was a G. Hale booked on a flight out of Berlin an hour after your plane's scheduled takeoff time."

Her head snapped up, shifting to search his eyes. "Could they have missed it?"

It was unlikely. As far as they knew, Mulder didn't have papers under that name and it would be damn hard to get out of Germany without some credentials. Marshall managed half a shake of his head.

"G. Hale bought two tickets, which might be why your guys missed it," Frohike continued. "One for himself and another for an E. Hale. Nonstop to San Diego."


	7. 7 Charlie

The waiting room was cold almost to the point of discomfort. He didn't mind for himself, suffocating in his dress blues, but a few flickering thoughts of global warming and energy conservation whirled around his disordered mind. A pack children ran underfoot, ignorant of the anxiety of their parents and guardians. A young receptionist flirted happily with a very married doctor while three men in line tapped their feet and cleared their throats. He wobbled back and forth on the uneven legs of his chair like a schoolboy, gleaning scathing looks from the matron beside him. She curled the back end of her Good Housekeeping magazine and he had the most ridiculous notion she was about to smack him on the nose like a puppy.

Finally, a mustached old man in a white coat appeared from that secret place behind the STAFF ONLY door.

"Charles?" he called.

He stood, unease creeping back down his spine. He'd worked in naval intelligence long enough to know what being played looked like and he did not particularly appreciate being on the receiving end of the experience. His trip to the civilian hospital, his third least favorite type of building on the planet, was prompted by a note he received through some pretty extraordinary means. The unassuming scrap of paper was laying on his desk inside the ONI. No one remembered dropping it off. No one saw anyone enter; no one saw anyone leave.

"Saint Andrew's  
Discharge Office  
3PM," was all it said.

He debated with himself all day. Maybe it was a prank by his friends or his brother. Maybe it was a surprise party by his wife-three months late. Or maybe it was something more insidious.

He didn't have any reason to suspect anyone was after him. His job put him in a few compromising positions and required he knew another few classified bits of information, but none that could potentially make him a target, certainly not in a crowded domestic hospital.

The doctor stopped him just outside a subtly blue room. A plastic curtain was pulled around the bed, concealing whomever might be behind it.

"I understand you're here to check out Mr. Hale and I just have a few discharge instructions."

He scrambled to remember if he knew anyone by that name while the doctor prattled on about the importance of hydration and possible medication interactions. His memory skirted over a few references to stars, but he dismissed it immediately.

He finally settled on Rick Hale, a seaman apprentice he almost remembered from his first tour at sea as the doctor handed him a clipboard and a pen.

A nurse emerged from behind the curtain, pushing a wheelchair before her, bearing a young man no older than eighteen. Certainly not Rick Hale.

He frowned at the young man and opened his mouth to ask if maybe someone had gotten their wires crossed when he saw the boy tilt his head. It wasn't enough to be called a shake and neither the doctor nor the nurse seemed to notice, but the movement silenced him and he took over wheeling the stranger to his car.

Under the fluorescent lights, the scars new and old on the boy's body were more than apparent. The top of his head, his face, his forearms, his calfs were all exposed and damaged. He saw deep surgical cuts with rough stitches through his hair on the crown on his head, but the burns and recent lacerations around his hands concerned him more, as well as the obvious splinting of a few broken fingers.

The poor kid had been tortured.

He took another quick look at the discharge paperwork the doctor had handed him, but none of the jumble made much sense. The halfhearted wish there was a doctor in the family flitted through his mind and he grunted inaudibly as grief tightened his chest. He thought he saw the young man shift uncomfortably, but he put it down to the transition from air conditioned hallway to sweltering San Diego summer sun.

When they arrived at his car door, he knelt before the boy, trying to determine which question he was going to ask first.

"Not here. Please, Mr. Scully."

The request floored him. Had he missed something? Did he know this boy or his family after all?

"They're watching," he muttered, struggling to rise from the wheelchair.

He took the boy's arm and helped him into the passenger's seat of his sedan. Someone had some explaining to do.

He considered where he should take the young man, but there was really only one option. He couldn't very well take him to a public place or anywhere outdoors, and his office was more than out of the question.

Thirty minutes later he pulled into his own driveway.

Thankfully Rachel had her acting class until seven and the kids were with his ex until Thursday, leaving him alone with the so-called Mr. Hale.

He watched the boy absorb the granite walk lined with begonias and black electric lanterns, the wisteria gently climbing free of the window boxes, and the collection of recycling bins standing at attention by the backdoor. The coal black roof slopped gently down into wire-covered gutters. He assisted the boy into the house and sat him on the blue and pink floral couch of Rachel's choosing.

He ran his hand over the back of his head. He wanted answers, but the kid had already had information beaten out of him and he didn't suppose an interrogation would get him far.

"My name isn't Hale." The young man's voice was hesitant. "I know you know that."

He snorted. "Tell me something I don't know."

His guest frowned. "There's not much you don't know. You've seen the signs in your profession, the inexplicable promotions, the unknown men taking power, people you thought you knew not acting like themselves. You've heard stories for years, strange tales about who they might be. Unexplainable, unbelievable, preposterous. You've wondered why the armed forces are being increasingly policed by these men. You've wondered why no one is asking questions. People are asking, Mr. Scully."

His earlier feeling of unease morphed into full-blown panic as the accuracy of the young man's statements crested.

"People like your sister."

He felt his involuntary inhalation as memories swirled around him. "My sisters are dead. Years dead. Both to a cause that . . . It doesn't matter. They're both gone and so is the insanity that stole their lives."

The impossibility of pity crossing the battered face of the young man seated on the couch blindsided him, but this damaged boy looked at him with a deeply disconcerting understanding. Somehow, in that heartbeat of a second, their roles had become reversed, as if he was the broken one, gaping without comprehension at a truth just out of reach, as if the boy on his sofa had come with his injuries to heal instead of be healed.

"No, Mr. Scully. Nothing is gone."

For a moment he thought he might strike the scarred boy. Missy's death was hard enough, but Dana's a few years later had been worse. The FBI hadn't been able to produce a body, but they were sure the term 'missing' was foolishly optimistic. They had the audacity to say 'killed in the line of duty,' like chasing aliens and monsters and figments of the imagination was honorable, like they believed it.

And to think this morning he'd been worried about global warming.

"Who the hell are you?" He was ashamed at the hushed tone of his question.

"You'll understand soon. He's here to explain it to you." The boy tipped a bruised face toward the door.

One beat, two, three, they waited, his guest staring at him and he at the entrance. Then the doorbell rang.

Numbly, he shuffled towards the foyer. He hadn't known what he expected when he opened the door, but this certainly wasn't it.

"Commander Scully, I'm Fox Mulder."


	8. 8 Reyes

**A/N:** I believe I have now dropped the f-bomb twice, making this R-rated were it a movie in accordance with the MPAA Film Rating System. I can't promise it won't happen again.

* * *

The only qualification she possessed for this job was the ability to speak Spanish.

Oh, and her comparative religions degree. She'd forgotten about that somewhere around the tenth set of ancient Mayan ruins.

Her armed escorts grunted with exertion, their machetes tearing holes through the thicker brush. Humidity settled around her shoulders like a blanket and crept into her loose clothing, making her feel heavy and sluggish. Insects attacked every part of her body while bits of clay grit sneaked into her boots and rubbed new callouses on top of old callouses. She imagined it would be easier, cleaner, and invariably safer to move through a sea of jello than this rainforest.

A bird screamed off to her right, its brilliantly colored wings streaking through the canopy.

She glanced at her GPS, smacking it against the flat of her hipbone to resolve the dangerously flickering readout. Muttering curses in three languages, she stamped the ground in frustration, the sound muffled by dead leaves and dirt.

Gage Toban silently freed the appliance from her grasp and swung the strap sidelong against his own body.

"Not far now," he intoned without even looking at the screen.

She resisted the familiar urge to pummel him with her fists, but the old soldier probably wouldn't even feel it, not considering he was one of Scully's. Instead, she rounded on her second chaperone.

"Canteen," she demanded, thrusting her hand out like a petulant child.

Jacob Blackley dragged his wrist across his flat forehead leaving a dirt track. His sweat ran in muted rivulets through his cropped sideburns and collected at his dimpled chin before falling to join the others soaking the collar of his T-shirt. She hated how the young man's eyes flicked to the elder's.

"Not far now," Jacob echoed happily. He cuffed her on the shoulder with a rough hand before palming his machete again.

The impulse to shriek until a squadron of Central American rebel soldiers or drug runners located and shot them all curdled in her forebrain.

This was all John Doggett's fault.

She would never forget the iron-clad blue of his eyes, the creases etching themselves into his sober face, the gravel rumble of his monotone informing her, briefly but certainly, of the necessity of his new assignment. And its stipulations. She remembered hurling the word 'prostitute' at him with force. She couldn't remember now if she meant it in reference to him or his bride-to-be.

The determination to remain with him startled her even as she denounced their obligation to the X-Files, to Mulder and Scully. She had just gotten him back and a year of partnership was not enough. She waited so long for him to call, to settle his marriage and his grief, to realize what she was more than willing to offer. In that moment he forced her to confront the depths of her desires, even as his Spartan attitude implicitly informed her of their futility.

No, he was no longer a broken thing, was no longer the man she comforted. He recovered from the death of his son only to stumble headlong into an even larger tragedy. And his honor would not let him idle.

She suspected she knew his motivations even better than he did in this instance. It did not take much speculation to determine the likely fountainhead of this plan.

This was all Dana Scully's fault.

She hadn't seen it at first. All she saw was a brittle woman clinging to the frayed ends of improbable faith, dragged along in the dwindling wake of her mythic partner's consuming quest. The playacting, the posturing, the pugnacious territoriality were all last-ditch efforts to conserve his memory in a recognizable fashion. She remembered the sympathy she felt for her, thinking she knew all the ins and outs of Dana Scully.

She understood nothing.

After Mulder was returned literally from the grave, she started to distinguish the changes in his partner. The tenor of her research, the medical and political connections she carefully catalogued, the subtle shift from looking for the truth to looking for the means behind it could only mean one thing.

Scully had never stopped working to save her partner.

Which really made this all Fox Mulder's fault.

As capable and motivated as Mulder's partner was, it was his ideology which drove the pair. She suspected that, if Scully never met Mulder, the woman would have dedicated herself as fully to the capture of human monsters. Instead, Mulder set her on the winding path that culminated in this charade of a secret war. Mulder's truth demanded much more than she would have ever believed.

Mulder said the date was set.

Scully said they could fight the future.

John just said yes.

Well screw them all.

Her steps faltered as she and her party broke into a clearing. A pair of stone winged serpents grinning into the daylight greeted them as they traversed what was left of a brick walkway leading towards a relatively tiny ancient temple, the façade no longer than twenty-five feet. She bent to take an impression of the pictograms on the bases of the statues.

The Maya language was irksome at best. Different artisans made different styles of symbols, much like the vast differences in penmanship and handwriting. Add to that the layering of symbols within symbols, hiding pictograms within the existing letter, sometimes altering the meaning completely, and the task of reading any inscriptions became more than tedious and required a certain amount of imagination.

Gage wore a compact frown while she worked and scanned the clearing before heading into the temple. Jacob plopped down contentedly and leaned against the carved face of the temple exterior. He hung the strap of his P-90 across the protruding head of a dragon-like snake statue and gnawed happily on a piece of dehydrated meat. She somewhat regretted her vengeful track of fucking every new soldier Scully assigned to her, especially this fling with the perennially dense Blackley, but there were a limited number of ways in which one could strike back at a would-be savior of the world.

"Monica," Gage's voice rang out from the interior of the temple.

She thought seriously about ignoring him before rising from her squatting position, her back and legs protesting in pops and cracks.

The exterior of the temple had been carved out of blocks of white stone, figures of snakes and men half covered by centuries of dirt and foliage. The entrance was tight for such a place, only six feet by three. A small antechamber covered in all but indistinguishable characters led to a narrow hallway. Two passageways on either side led to other small cavities. Gage was situated in the final room, a couple glow-sticks illuminated in his hand. He passed the light over the painted mural.

She felt a smile tug at her mouth as she recognized the image of a giant snake, the sun and the moon spitting water onto the figures of men.

"The end of humanity," she whispered, reaching out to reverently run the tips of her fingers along the iridescent paint. "Just like the Dresden Code."

Gage nodded in silent agreement.

She scanned the rest of the wall in the dim light. Text and numbers aligned themselves around larger pictures. Faded colors were still mute with brilliance as they gave witness to the knowledge and understanding of a civilization centuries dead.

"We found it," she breathed.

"I'll set up camp," he informed her, handing her the pack of notes and archaeology tools.

* * *

**A/N:** The Maya written language is in actuality incredibly fascinating. Only fairly recently (in relative terms) decoded, the pure aesthetic value and incredible elegance of this decorative writing is well worth a little study. The temple on which I base this one does exist in the Yucatan, however, I took significant creative latitude with the remoteness, lack of tourist traffic, and interior contents and design. The Dresden Code, which I will reference in more detail later, is an actual Maya text named for the German city in which it is held. I anticipate a more comprehensive description and usage of this civilization in later chapters.


	9. 9 Marita

She supposed this was inevitable.

The first part of her adult life spent embroiled in a conspiracy, navigating foreign and domestic politics, crossings and double-crossings, and the second part dodging literal and figurative bullets, building a resistance, it seemed rather fitting that she should be blindsided by a bunch of loony country bumpkins.

She glowered at Spender's unconscious form.

Lost outside of Mariestad on their way to the international airport in Orebro, she stopped to ask for directions at a tiny gas station. Spender had gotten out of the car to stretch his legs and the sight of his scarred skin pulled grotesquely taut over his bones was the last thing she remembered before she woke up in this farmhouse with a sizable knot on her head. Judging from likely travel time, she suspected they were still somewhere in the Skaraborg countryside.

She took another long look around the sparse room. A pine dresser stood empty in one corner, and a low table with a simple lamp and a pitcher of water in the other. Two twin wrought iron beds with lumpy mattresses and no sheets were the only other pieces of furniture. In the window, however, hung a small stained glass cross, an Egyptian hieroglyph eye at the center. Outside the second-story window was a view of another farmhouse, two barns, a smattering of farm equipment, and what she only assumed were stables or other outhouses converted for recreational uses, followed by the rocky, rolling landscape of Sweden.

Neither the window nor the door would budge and their captors relieved her of her picks. There was little she could do towards their escape, though, until Spender woke.

Footsteps on the landing alerted her to a man's approach. Silently, she lowered herself back onto the bed. She heard a key scraping in the lock and then the sound of boots.

"You can stop pretending to be asleep. I saw you from the window." His voice was a cool baritone.

Sighing, she sat up and took a slow inventory of his person. A sturdy frame filled out his jeans and blue and white plaid shirt. Tanned skin rippled over hard muscles, marred by moles steadily transforming themselves into liver spots from prolonged sun exposure. Calloused hands ended in blunt fingertips and earthy nails. Mahogany locks peppered with gray fell loosely into mud-colored irises. An odor of soil with a hint of acidity surrounded him.

"Sorry about the knock on the head," he said, stepping to the foot of her bed. "But you walk with the devil, you know."

Her eyes slipped sideways to Spender. Of all the-

Half of her almost thought this was Alex's doing. He would be just vindictive enough to set up this little farce, but what were the chances that he would have found a faction with a fixation for deformed devils? in Sweden, no less, one of the least religious countries in the world. Besides, Krycek, with no little amount of snickering over her companion, had provided her only with papers for Jeffery through their mutual contacts in Singapore; he would not have known the route she planned to take back to the states. She had an unavoidable engagement in Copenhagen, and she thought it would be easier to get Spender out through Sweden.

"Your papers say you're American. You speak English?"

The impulse to roll her eyes bubbled up from her stomach.

"He's not the devil," she spoke slowly. "He's a very sick man. I'm trying to help him."

The man sighed and leaned against the window frame. " 'And the Pharisees sayeth, It is only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that this man drives out demons. But He sayeth, It is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons and so the Kingdom of God has come unto you.' "

He turned, retrieved the glass cross from the window, and held it out to her.

"Alchemy gives us clear eyes so that we may see the demons in this world and cast them out."

Good. Insanity on top of religious fanaticism. And she thought they were just a regular bunch of overzealous, obsessive murderers.

"You know, he looks that way to everyone," she informed him.

The man gave her a moment of lopsided consideration before exiting the room and re-locking the door.

It was time to go.

She shook Spender's shoulder once, then again, harder, but with no response. She dipped her hand into the water vase on the bedside table and flicked the liquid onto his face. A few droplets disappeared sickeningly into the hole beside his nose, but he groaned and squinted up at her.

"Wha . . ."

She helped him to his feet before whirling to face the door. She peered into the lock. Standard enough.

"Come on, Jeffy, unless you want your last meal to be fish and knackebrod."

She separated the cross from its chain and then shattered the bottom pane against the iron bed frame.

"What are you talking about? Where are we?" He reeled as his gaze darted around the room and clutched his head.

With some difficulty, she separated two ends of wire and flattened them against the table with the help of the base of the lamp.

"We're up fudge creek if we don't get out of here," she told him, shoving the wire ends into the brass door lock. A slight echo sounded as the tumblers dropped into place and she turned the handle.

"Are you MacGyver?" he questioned, his tone admiring.

She grinned at him before checking the narrow hall. Grabbing his sleeve, she drug him down the hardwood steps. She stopped at the landing, listening, but heard no one.

They emerged into a wide space with a wood-burning range at its center. To the right was a kitchen area. Iron and copper pans and pots dangled from a rack above an island. The cupboards were painted in white, what wasn't chipped was fading. To the left was an open living space, the floor covered in grass mats and squares of fraying carpet, like a hobo's yoga studio. A painting of a giant green tablet covered the face of the far wall, writing scratched in it.

Spender escaped her grip and wandered dazedly over to the mural. He traced his fingers along the lettering.

"The Emerald Tablet of Thoth," he whispered.

"Are you crazy?" she demanded in a low hiss, yanking him toward a mud-room exit. "These people are going to exorcise you, and I don't mean they care about your cardiovascular health."

Outside, she made a B-line for the first barn. The back lawn was littered with tools: buckets, rakes, post-holers, pitchforks, bits of rope, empty paint cans, shovels and spades, torn bridles, nails and studs. A slanting ramshackle fence enclosed the lot. She halted as she heard Spender trip over an exposed water pump pipe and kick a horse brush into a can. There had to be a car around here somewhere. She just hoped she could find it before Jeffery decided to get her killed.

They reached the first barn and peered in the dirty window.

The space had been converted into a congregation, a make-shift podium looking out on rough benches. The man who had visited her was speaking to a collection of thirty-odd apt listeners.

" 'There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea.' "

"Well that's oddly irrelevant," she heard Spender mutter at her ear.

It was definitely time to go.

She gestured him towards another building. Prying open the heavy door, she found their rental car half hidden under a worn blue tarp. She climbed into the driver's seat, her fingers searching the visor and mats for the keys. Spender clambered into the passenger's side and opened the glove compartment.

"Papers are still here," he said with some consolation.

"Knife," she requested. He rustled around and placed the short blade in her hand.

She released the ignition wires and stripped a quarter inch of rubber off the ends.

"Teach me to do that sometime."

She smirked at him as the engine roared to life. Backing the car out, they both turned toward the barn as shouting people poured from the double doors.

"I mean, not right now," he qualified as she threw the car into drive and peeled down the gravel driveway. "But sometime."

She couldn't help the small chortle that escaped her lips as they reached the road, cultists waving their pitchforks and tripping over themselves in the chase.

* * *

**A/N:** If something sounds strange, I royally butchered the first quotation from Matthew, but it had to be done. It didn't flow well. The second verse is relatively correct, however. And yes, I might have stranded Marita and Spender with a group of crazies for the sole purpose of introducing a Bible verse. Also, the Emerald Tablet is a genuine reference, although I have no plans to make it an integral part of this piece as of yet, just in small allusions.


	10. 10 Marshall

No one ever paged him to the security desk with good news.

He clicked a quick acknowledgement over the radio. Silently, he checked his concealed weapon and collected his jacket before heading for the door. Scully was still deeply engrossed in whatever news the Snake's courier delivered the other day and would most likely not note his departure. Her obliviousness in research mode was impressive. He considered waking her from her science-induced coma long enough to borrow her bracelet, but decided against it. It was better not to worry her.

The hospital was all but asleep, only a scant few nurses milling around the center station and yawning behind patient charts when he reached ground level. Mr. Upton in 3-B was still alone. His daughter was trying to fly in from the US, but it was unlikely she would make it. Susan, not bothering to hide the biscuit wrapper, slipped the treat into her mouth and gave him a languid wave as he passed the storeroom.

His soles scuffed gently against the freshly disinfected linoleum. Scully required he wear scrubs while in the hospital, meaning every time a possible crisis arose he found himself shifting uncomfortably in clothing that felt all too thin. He supposed it wouldn't be very subtle if he roamed around in fatigues, but this orderly's attire chaffed against his soldier's training even after eight years of practice.

He still remembered the corrosive doubt and second thoughts he experienced when he learned what his role in this private police force would be.

Ostensively a secretary, his job encompassed everything from lackey to combat trainer. He recognized the necessity even if he did not relish the opportunity for himself. She was good, a true navy man's daughter, but she was not yet a general, not like she would need to be to lead this battle. She was too lenient, too trusting, too damn malleable. She had the habit of compartmentalizing her life, carefully separating the world of monsters from the world she once thought was the only one. Her eyes spoke too much. Personality flaws aside, she had never led a battle, had never even been near one. She lacked experience and training.

She did, however, have all the information.

And she was the only one with a plan.

A ruthless one at that.

He recalled being startled and unwittingly impressed when he learned that her desire to immunize as many people as possible had less to do with number of lives saved and more to limit the number of potential enemy hostiles. Dead in a firefight was preferable to gestational fodder. She was not wrong, but he hadn't expected it and he started to think that maybe she was more equipped than he considered. The number of super soldiers was still a dangerous unknown, but sifting through prodigious piles of abductee data and records of anomalies provided them with a rough estimate. At least it was better than nothing. He had yet to meet a true super soldier. He suspected it might be quite a fight when he came toe to toe with one.

Years and proximity and acquaintance inured him to her person. Maybe not the whole, never the whole, but enough to assuage his unjustified fears.

Mulder once told him a story about a young Scully and her professor, about a devotion she hadn't meant to inspire and the decade it stole from Daniel, unrequited. He thought at the time her partner had been trying to assure him of her ability to galvanize loyalty, something he already experienced first hand in glacial Russia. But these days he wasn't sure it hadn't been a warning.

Or a threat.

Profiler. He always forgot that.

Eddie waved him over to the security desk when he stepped through the admittance dividing doors.

"Rob," the younger man's voice was only a whisper in tone, not in volume. "You said to call you if anyone strange ever showed up, right?"

The hospital staff all knew him as Robert Thomas, a severely uncreative invention of Scully's.

Eddie picked at a pimple on his chin with a jagged nail as he leaned in conspiratorially, smearing grease from his earlier burger and fries on his face. "That one, right there," he pointed a pudgy finger at a woman seated on a black plastic chair in the waiting room, the revealing motion unnecessary as the waiting area held no one else.

Marshall felt his expression shift to carefully blank as he glanced at her. Bottle-red hair, milky skin, nice clothing and a strange gold glyph at her neck were the only distinguishing characteristics on a quick, distant inspection.

Scully had been opposed to commandeering the hospital's security. She was adamant that the precautions they took both with the relocation from the previous hospital and their aliases would be sufficient concealment, and he had given in. It was a hassle every time they switched hospitals and maybe he was being overly cautious. No one ever found them.

Now he was wondering if he made a mistake.

"She's a witch."

He resisted the desire to roll his eyes. "Ed-"

"And she's lookin' for Doc' Ellery."

Marshall felt a chill run down his spine at the mention of Scully's anonym.

"You want me to taze' her, Rob?"

He leaned over and patted Eddie on the shoulder twice. "Naw man, wouldn't want you to get cursed," he rolled off his tongue with a slight drawl.

"Riiiight. Good thinkin', eh!"

He left Eddie brushing his mint-condition taser and complementary pepper spray with a thoughtful tempo. The waiting area was still completely empty, save Eddie's witch. He approached her slowly.

"I can take you back now," he said.

She jumped, the magazine on her lap clattering to the floor. Electric blue eyes met his and when she smiled her features were striking. He led her to the most secluded exam room. Never taking his eyes from her lithe form, he let the door fall shut and pulled on a pair of latex gloves.

"What seems to be the trouble?" He found himself appreciating her charming grin even as he recognized the potential threat in every motion she made.

"I'm actually not sick," she admitted, her voice musically smooth. "I'm looking for someone, a Doctor Lauren Ellery. Do you know where I might find her?"

"Why?" He tried to keep his voice conversational, but the flicker in her features told him he might not have pulled it off.

"I . . . You're probably going to think I'm nuts," she laughed, a tinkling of appealing notes. "I've been on a journey and I was drawn here."

"Sorry?"

"The energies of the universe led me here."

Marshall found himself suddenly less disappointed in Eddie. Maybe she really was a witch. He glanced again at the charm dangling from a fine gold chain around her neck. A dome shape covering an upright arrow. Hell if he knew what it meant.

"You're not going to let me see her, are you?" she sighed.

He stiffened at her words, but her tone was good-humored and acquiescing. Her gaze was cast about the room for a moment.

"Well, maybe you can tell me where I can find Dana Scully."

His blood surged with adrenalin. He crossed the short distance between them in a split second, one hand grasping at the back of her neck and the other clamping down on her mouth. He ran his fingertips up and down her spine, but it was smooth. Removing his hand from her lips, he retrieved an empty syringe from his pocket and forced the tip into her protesting palm.

"What the- Ouch! What the hell do you think you're doing?"

His gaze passed back and forth from the syringe to the sanguine dot on her skin in a double-take. Both red.

"Who are you?" His steely demand accompanied by the handgun in his grip halted her attempts to collect the contents of her purse which spilled during the struggle. Brightly colored photographs of intricate crop circles shifted around, loose on the floor.

Straightening to face him, her eyes were hard in her assessment. "My name is Colleen Azar and I'm looking for Dana Scully."

* * *

**A/N:** Just a short aside (I know there have been way too many author's notes), I expect a bit of a delay in the next chapter. It has finally become unavoidable; I must write a Mulder chapter. It is difficult for me to insert the right amount of snark, wit and despondent responsibility into his voice. I am not male, a psychologist, Oxford educated, a believer or well-researched in the field, so one can imagine my difficulties. In any event, if anyone at all is reading this, there is no reason to be alarmed. And maybe use the interim to provide me with some feedback? ;)

Also, no infringement meant on Rob Thomas or Matchbox Twenty, etc.


	11. 11 Mulder

Scully was going to be pissed. Not just you-ditched-me-again pissed, not just you-pocketed-my-ova-in-a-cloning-facility? pissed, not just you-fucked-up-and-now-I-have-to-lie-to-another-Senate-committee pissed, but glacially, atomically, devastatingly pissed when she discovered what he was doing.

Masochism aside, he was almost looking forward to it. Over the years she spent too much damn time with soldiers. She was due for a little overreaction. She might even let him keep his balls if he brought her the prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box.

Charlie Scully had been less than voluntarily forthcoming, but Mulder hadn't needed him to be. It was lucky the navy man waited until Mulder showed up to start protesting. They would have been in a bit of a spot if the commander made a scene at the hospital. Charlie furiously denied them access to the Farragut Technical Analysis Center and promptly threw them into the street minutes later. All in all not unexpected from a Scully brother. Mulder was just happy he hadn't taken a swing at him when he revealed not only was his sister alive, but she had an active hand in advancing Charlie in his current occupation in order to aid her, and by extension Mulder himself. In hindsight, probably not the best way to recommend himself, but it wasn't like his dealings with Bill had given him much practice.

The keycard was harder than the access codes thanks to Gibson.

When he stumbled across Jeffery Spender in the Middle East, Mulder certainly hadn't expected his brother to be such a wealth of information. Including the location of Gibson Praise, Spender also handed over tantalizing puzzle-piece shaped bits about the continuation of his father's legacy even without their shadowy commanders, as well as the most intriguing crumb about an ancient intercultural conspiracy of resistance devised around the existence of a prophesy, the same prophesy that led Spender to de-alienize Mulder's son. Even if Spender never knew the whole, he acted on the rumor. Which of course only reminded Mulder of the offense.

In retrospect, he might have been a little harsher on Spender than was warranted given the broken man's justified sense of vengeance and thorough, almost willful, disbelief in the veracity of archaic mythology. However, in thwarting his smoking father's assiduously laid plans, Spender also might have inadvertently destroyed humanity's last hope for survival. In that light, a few months' sentence in a Singapore prison was laughably lenient.

Mulder was not under any delusion that his search for William was purely altruistic, however.

Scully was going to be so pissed.

Spender was unable or unwilling to tell him what he knew about the UFO cult which had kidnapped William as an infant, other than confirmation that they were acting on highly interpreted predictions made centuries ago by an unspecified culture. Luckily, Mulder already had a hunch or two on that score.

He did not envy Monica Reyes, tromping around the Central American jungle in the middle of summer, but if she found what he was convinced she would, it would be well worth the effort.

Meanwhile, there was little time remaining to hedge his bets.

Beside him, Gibson shifted nervously and fiddled with the black MP armband over his fatigues.

"You know, this plan is crazy." Gibson's resigned voice drifted through the roar of the engine, the hum of the air conditioner and the chaos of mid-morning DC traffic.

He glanced at the laminated ID badge on his lapel. Gibson was right, of course. The boy didn't look much like a soldier and Mulder didn't look anything like a statistician or any kind of scientist, but a quiet infiltration was the only way to get the information he needed. Mulder hadn't dared involve the Gunmen for a midnight break-in. They were busy enough at the base and it was never a given they would keep his mission a secret from Scully. The ridiculous cliché of an estranged mother and father working at cross purposes with their children torn in between flitted through his amused mind.

Gibson rolled his eyes and adjusted the bill on his cap. "You're hopeless."

He grinned at Gibson's commentary. He was used to mind readers by now; Scully wasn't any less perceptive to his thoughts most days.

He turned onto Suitland and watched the familiar glass-faced buildings through the window, their white concrete drives and brick-enclosed landscaping baking in the sun. In the past, there was little reason for him to frequent this side of DC. On the contrary, he took steps to avoid it, as Suitland Road served as a link between Andrew's Air Force Base, Boling Air Force Base and the Pentagon, and as they pulled into the FTAC's parking lot he remembered why.

Too much camouflage.

He turned to Gibson before he could exit the car.

"Remember: get in; find the data; get out. No unnecessary risks."

Gibson waved a dismissing hand in his direction. "Just don't give us away, old man."

If any child living had a right to grow up with a vengeance, it was Gibson, and he certainly made use of it.

They exited the car and reached the double glass doors together. Gibson held one side open and followed him inside. The foyer was polished granite, a large emblem of the FTAC affixed to the stone, featuring the glowing nucleus of an atom blazing above a bald eagle. To the left and right were security checkpoints, both empty save the guards. Mulder's ID, regretfully stolen from Charlie Scully, admitted him passed the metal detectors and he waved Gibson through.

Gibson hesitated, focused intently on one of the guards, then headed toward the golden doors of the elevators.

Mulder frowned as Gibson punched the DOWN arrow. His information indicated the records office they were looking for was on the ground level in the east wing of the building. He was not about to question his companion, however.

The elevator rumbled to a stop and the doors slid open. Gibson leaned across his body to hit G1.

"We don't have much time," he whispered, straitening.

Urgency skittered down his spine. The records for the technical research ship USS _Belmont_ (AGTR-4) were his last best hope at finding William. Scully made sure the adoption records were sealed and scrubbed, but she never had the power to erase the military data that was collected on the ship she, Doggett and Reyes watched sink at a Boston port. Luckily for him, that information was backed up at the FTAC, or so his sources had every reason to believe.

The elevator doors opened on a whitewashed hallway lined on both sides with glass windows. Through them were towering computer servers placed in precise rows. Climate controlled air crept into his clothing as they progressed down the hall, their rubber soles making soft snicks against the linoleum tile. A swipe of Charlie's access card admitted them to a control station with several consoles arranged overlooking the equipment.

"Come on, boy genius. Help me out here," he muttered, typing commands into a keyboard. A plain login screen appeared.

"Can't read a hard disk with my mind," Gibson retorted, but pulled up his own screen anyway. "Here," he called after a moment.

Mulder turned to Gibson's monitor and pulled up the files for the _Belmont_. Positions and logs appeared, all standard. He punched in a few more commands, bringing up the objectives and relative information. A large file named only MDIVR was the last in the catalogue. It opened onto a list of files all alphanumerically titled. The information in the directories was encrypted; he would have to download all of it. He pulled a thumb drive from his pocket.

"Mulder."

He inserted the drive and copied the archive. The hum and whir of mechanical cooling fans kicked into life sounded in his ears.

"Mulder."

The computer beeped its completion and he removed the drive.

"Mulder! We've got to go," Gibson insisted, dragging him to his feet.

They stumbled out of the control room only to find two legitimate MPs advancing on them from the left end of the hallway. Mulder took off at a brisk walk in the opposite direction toward the elevator, Gibson an easy two steps behind him. He poked the UP button repeatedly and glanced over his shoulder.

The doors glided open.

Two more MPs stepped out of the lift, their faces grim and eyes curiously amused.

Gibson's fatalistic sigh halted Mulder's frantic thoughts of escape. He looked at the boy's calm expression, but the MP's next words answered his questions.

"The Ibis requests your presence."

Oh yeah. Scully was definitely pissed.

* * *

**A/N:** The USS _Belmont_ is a real technical research class ship for the US Navy, however, I have commandeered it for this story and made it the ship Knowle Rohrer blew up in NIHT2 (9x02). I half expect the real FBI to arrive on my doorstep with some of the research I've done for this piece. I had better not buy a bag of fertilizer or I suspect they will put me on a terrorist watchlist.


	12. 12 Skinner

The dark office was a sauna, but the man behind the desk showed no sign of being uncomfortable. Green upholstered walls were halved by oak wainscoting, ending in hand-carved moulded baseboards. Dusky plush carpet was covered by an intricate Shiraz area rug in heavy navy and burgundy with flaxen tassels. The desk itself was cherry and completely uncluttered. A simple black desk set, an empty inbox and a leather-edged desk pad were the only items in view. Dusty light spilled from between slatted blinds, throwing his companion's face into a half silhouette.

Skinner shifted, the studded leather armchair creaking under him. It smelled new. Everything about this office smelled new, but looked old. He locked eyes with the man behind the desk, suddenly determined to win this waiting game.

He'd been more than surprised when he received the message, and it took a lot to shock him since the day six years ago Scully found him an unopposed senate seat and, through what had to be some pretty extraordinary means, convinced the public that he was the right choice for the office. All those years of thinking Mulder was the wild child were wasted as the outline of Scully's conspiracy emerged.

His appointment to the Senate Subcommittee for Science and Space under the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation was another small bombshell. Generally an unwanted responsibility, unlike the higher-profile appointments like Appropriations, he was probably the least qualified man for the job. Still, he was not long in divining the real reason for this particular position.

The subcommittee conducted oversight on NASA, the NSF and the OSTP. Most importantly, under the guise of the NSF, information about microchip implants found its way to his desk. It took a bit of digging and a fair amount of patience, but he discovered where the tests were administered, the locations of the records and data collected from the experiments, and the whereabouts of the control systems that monitored the implants. He filtered his findings back to Scully through his secretary, a fairly obvious soldier plant who oozed with combat reflexes and couldn't make a decent cup of coffee.

It meant, in short, that she would be able to find, infiltrate, maintain and control the science which kept herself and numerous other abductees alive.

As a bonus, he also stumbled upon the technology that governed the nanobots in his bloodstream. He spent the better part of a year traveling to and from Scully's different hospitals in Canada, but she finally succeeded in permanently deactivating the nanomachines. He might not know about science, biology or chemistry, but he surely knew Alex Krycek was going to be in trouble the next time fate threw them together.

The success of his second mission overshadowed the failure of his first. Contact the alien rebels. Well, contact was the easy part. From a lack of understanding, diplomatic faux-pas on his part or just plain apathy on theirs, the rebels had been uninterested in an alliance.

From the rebel representative seated across from him, however, that fact seemed to have changed.

"Senator."

An alien looked at him with the stolen face of a man, a kind face, the face of someone's grandfather. Soft chestnut eyes crinkled with laughter at their corners while a cherry tomato nose gave the impression of perpetual good humor. Snowy hair hung in erratic patches from the sides of his head. His ears were large and slightly crooked, and suggested the notion that, if he could only flap them, he would fly away.

With another entity controlling the reins, however, the man's mouth was drawn in a grim line and his jowls hung loosely without a smile to hold them aloft.

"Doubtless you know why we've summoned you." His voice was cracked, falsetto with age.

Skinner pursed his lips. "I do not. Last time I was unwelcome, to say the least."

The alien drummed his fingertips against the desktop, something Skinner thought humanly revealing. "Circumstances have changed."

He felt suspicion pull at his consciousness. When he tried before to entice the rebels to aid their resistance, he offered everything they had. Maybe now they had a little more information, better networks and a hell of a lot more soldiers, but the essentials never altered. He wondered what had.

The alien's lip twitched into a half-grimmace, half-sneer, all impatience.

"You have the Din Gir."

His eyebrows knit in confusion. "The Din Gir."

His companion huffed in annoyance and his finger drumming picked up in tempo. "I request a meeting with your mistress."

Skinner felt a snarl rise from his throat, the familiar compulsion to protect the men under his command, the agents under his authority, swirling in his gut. He was awhile out of the FBI and even longer out of service, but his instincts held true. "No. You deal with me," he insisted, forcing a marine edge into his voice.

"You do not understand."

They fell into a heated silence. Skinner kept his eyes trained on the man and the man looked everywhere but at Skinner.

He tried to remember everything he ever knew about aliens, but he could not recall any references to a Din Gir. Mulder's case reports were always lengthy and volatile, filled with erratic leaps from this ancient culture to that new age theory, technical terminology paired haphazardly with outlandish pseudoscience. Most often, he would start with Scully's version before moving to Mulder's more cinematic interpretation.

But his memory, like so many other of his qualities, would never compare to Fox Mulder.

"We have always been slaves, Senator," his counterpart started finally. "From the dawn of our race, we have been but vehicles for a cancer. We have no arrogance. Your race has in its memory always been free and you are riddled with conceit. You've been given a gift, the ultimate gift, and even you, a man embroiled in the fight, cannot see it."

"The Din Gir?"

"Yes."

Skinner shifted against the leather again. He may not be a Fox Mulder, but he sure as hell wouldn't allow a potential assassin anywhere near Scully. No, if this proved threat instead of offer, well, they'd have to get through him first. It was the only thing he had left to offer them.

"Why now? Why not just take this Din Gir? Why change your mind about helping us?"

"You could not win before."

The futility of years gone by erupted into being. The blood and sweat, the number of lives lost, every certainty and possibility taken again and again seemed an inconceivably high price to pay only to learn that the outcome was inevitable. Time and tears were all the testament there would ever be to their struggle. Mulder's, Scully's, even his. They had all in some way gone looking for dragons. And found them. They found the impossible. Now they were faced with the task of surviving the discovery.

And if this Din Gir was going to help, then he was damn well going to use it.

The alien sighed and inspected the nails of his restless hand. "I wish to meet with your mistress to negotiate the terms of an alliance. You cannot hope to prevail without us and we will never defeat them without the Din Gir."


	13. 13 Doggett

He was starting to believe his body had a preternatural instinct for sensing the presence of Fox Mulder. A tightening of his jaw, a pounding in his head, a twitch at his temple. The closer he got to the Pentagon's detention hold, the worse his symptoms became. Perhaps he somehow absorbed the skill from Scully, however, he suspected he had an opposite physical reaction to Mulder's company.

Henderson was being especially circumspect since the notice came through and refused to leave his side, even insisted on accompanying him to see Mulder. Doggett surmised his nominal secretary was acting under orders from their clandestine leader, but the man's watchdog attitude was only stoking his lividity.

It wasn't until he almost broke the pen attached to the sign-in sheet that he realized Henderson might be here to protect Mulder from Doggett instead of the reverse.

The basement jail was dark and cool. Cinderblock walls painted black were lined with glass-enclosed cells, circular holes cut into the panes at waist height. All of the compartments were empty, except for a boy in soldier's clothing ringing a camouflage cap in his hands and a man lounging on a tin cot.

At his approach, the boy tossed his hat through a gap in the glass wall, striking the man's shoulder. They both turned and watched Doggett and Henderson stalk down the hall.

Doggett saw Mulder's eyes go wide in surprise a second before he split into a shit-eating grin. The twitch at his temple increased. He glanced over his shoulder at Henderson to confirm the security of their conversation. Henderson nodded slightly.

"Don't look so pleased with yourself, Muldah," he growled.

Doggett didn't miss the questioning look Mulder shot Gibson, but the boy seemed to be ignoring him in favor of Henderson.

"General Doggett, is it?" he quipped, sarcasm engulfing his normal monotone as he saluted with the wrong hand. "Scully didn't tell me you actually made it. Congratulations."

He always thought it must have been half an accident that Scully fell into Mulder's orbit. Young enough to recognize his authority, educated enough to respect his intellect and affable enough to refuse dismissing him outright, he could see the initial draw in those early days. However, Mulder's lack of concern for protocol alone should have been sufficient cause for disgust from a navy man's daughter.

Mulder's personality was ample grounds for Doggett's dislike.

"I got about a million other things I could be doin' with my day, so don' push me."

Though he'd been preparing for some time for a full-scale operation in light of the chaos Scully's engineered viruses would cause, he could not openly pursue the level of readiness the men would need for a full military occupation of the US. While he'd seen to the distribution and inspection of necessary hardware, a number of the soldiers he would need to enforce martial law were still inactive and moreover inexperienced.

"Look, you've got places to be. I understand that. You can just bust us out of here, and we'll be on our way and out of your hair."

The temptation to keep Mulder locked up and possibly gaged niggled at the back of his head.

"Listen, I got somethin' to say to you, first. And you should know the only reason I'm even here is orders."

Mulder's grin widened. "So Scully wants me alive? That bodes well."

"Don' be so sure," he snorted. "Dollars to doughnuts, she wants to torture you first."

Mulder sneered and took a turn around the small cell. "So she sent her dog to ensure my safe delivery."

"She was nonspecific," he replied flatly. "But by my math, she's got every right to wanna see you beaten to a pulp. Just what in the hell did you think you were doin'?"

"Excuse me?"

"Givin' up that baby was the hardest decision I ever saw her make, and you don' even care, do you? you selfish son of a bitch."

Mulder's eyes hardened and his voice turned steely. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"I was there!" He took a step back to try to reign in his volume even as his anger swelled. The memory of her broken heart melded with his own experiences and amplified every emotion. "She gave that boy up to protect him, to give the kid a normal life, and now you wanna drag him back into this? I won't let you do that to her-to either of them."

He watched something like understanding pass over Mulder's face, which he recognized as the only apology he would ever receive.

"It's too late. William's already an integral part of this fight. He has been for thousands of years." The sneer on his face was more pity than disgust. "You fell in love with the wrong part of her, John Doggett."

He felt his lips part in shock.

"You fell in love with the woman, but the person behind that is more extraordinary." Mulder shook his head. "Eleven years ago she needed you to protect her, but she doesn't need protection anymore."

Emotion thundered in and out of his mind, realization nipping at his consciousness. For the first time, he could almost see the whole picture, could almost discern a partnership that defied logic, reason and insurmountable odds.

Goddamn profilers.

"Mulder," the boy's voice rang through the charged air.

For the first time, he took a good look at Mulder's companion. Time and tension had taken a toll on him, but it was still undeniably Gibson Praise.

"That man," Gibson pointed a calloused finger at Henderson's silent form. "He . . ."

Mulder's face took on a closed expression and reexamined Doggett's face with a sharper eye before shifting to Henderson. "Gibson?"

"He thinks too many things." Gibson frowned, shaking his head in mild confusion.

Doggett rounded on Henderson, his hand automatically falling to where his weapon would normally be holstered. To his surprise, Henderson only quirked a small smile, politely linked his hands behind his back, and leveled a respectful gaze at Gibson.

After a moment of mutual regard, Gibson started to laugh, a scratchy sound, gravelly from disuse. The young man turned to Mulder.

"Oh man, I'd hate to be you, Mulder."

Mulder tipped his head, a question in his glance.

"Your partner's ready to take your head off." The boy smiled at Henderson. "And we're headed straight there." 


	14. 14 Marita

She kicked her heels against the plaster base of the exhibit, drumming in time with the music in her head. The flashlight beam swung back and forth across the display, its rays shattering off of the plexiglass panels and arcing toward the cream-colored walls. She shifted the shaft of light and made a muted prism rainbow above a sign detailing the artifacts on the opposite wall.

Spender scowled, but only nudged her off of the part of the text he was attempting to read through the glass.

"If anyone sees you sitting there, they'll throw us out," he grumbled.

"If anyone sees us at all, they'll throw us out," she sneered. "Or most likely worse."

She knew from some amount of experience that she could get into any military base in this country easier than the Saxon State Library. Double-locking steel doors, independent security network, encrypted passcodes and sophisticated alarming devices all provided an agreeable challenge. Now that they were in, however, she was bored.

"Couldn't you have used-oh, I don't know-the internet?" She swerved the streak of light in his direction until it glared unevenly from the scarring on his face. "That's a thing now."

He rolled his eyes and pressed two damaged fingertips to the bridge of his nose. She thought she heard something like "see it for myself" escape from a clenched jaw, but he otherwise ignored her.

Well. He was Mulder's brother after all. She'd had her doubts, but dragging her off to Germany scant hours after escaping the clutches of a murderous cult, demanding she break him into the highest security library she'd ever had the pleasure of dismantling instead of dropping in during public hours like a normal person, just to visit the Dresden Codex, was a singularly Fox Mulder thing to do. She wondered wrathfully if she should dye her hair red and see about having a continuously arched eyebrow etched onto her forehead.

With a sigh, she hopped down from the display and wandered around the perimeter of the room. Three sets of black and gold plaques detailed the history of the Maya text in German while another set gave a rough translation of both sides. Decorative replicas of Maya relics and photographs of their step pyramids littered the walls, while the opposite wall was covered with a map of Mesoamerica denoting the relevant locations. The Codex's display itself was slightly higher than waist height with lighted panels, running down the length of the room, twelve feet in excess. Two sheets of Amate paper filled with intricate scribblings and occasional illustrations still ripe with pigment sat within the case. Mirrors were angled precisely to catch the underside of the text. Jeffery was staring at page seventy-four. If he had any nose to speak of, she expected it would be pressed against the glass.

He muttered a few things under his breath, tapped his fingers against his thumb in succession as if counting something, then bolted for the door to the main reading room.

She made a face and bent to collect the English-translated pamphlet he dropped before trudging after him.

The main reading room was cavernous. Two stories of bookshelves ran the entire perimeter, while two more stories of offices and floors of books were stacked on top. Thirty or more ten foot desks were aligned in three columns in the center of the room. The ceiling was one giant fluorescent light, but currently dark as she had to adjust the building's power in order to aid their break-in.

She spied the flicker of Spender's flashlight beam disappearing down a side hallway. By the time she found the right doorway, the right row and the right shelf, he was cross-legged on the ground, surrounded with stacks of texts. She swung the light up to catch the section.

Glauben.

Religion.

"Jeff."

He didn't look up. He just continued to flip through the books and stack them, still open, on top of one another. A morbid thought about German librarian matrons paddling schoolboys who left books out and creased their pages fluttered through her mind.

"Jeff, we really don't have time for you to be playing professor."

She froze as she heard a distant bang, then a scraping sound.

"Jeffery." She covered the page he was reading with her hand. "Might I suggest, again, the internet?"

He blinked as if only just realizing she was there, flashlight dangling comically from between his lips.

"Time's up."

"Another minute," he managed after removing his flashlight from his mouth. "It's all here, Marita. Everything. The prophesy, all the religions, they're all the same. They're telling us the same thing. The trinity" -he pointed to a picture of a snake, the sun and the moon pouring water onto a mass of people, the same image on the Codex he was studying so intently earlier- "is real."

"There's someone here," she hissed, enunciating every word into his face.

He seemed to shake himself out of his reverie and clambered to his feet.

She pulled him passed shelf after shelf, row after row of books, more convinced every moment by the lack of noise that they were no longer alone. He kept up a low-voiced commentary as they rushed through the darkened building toward the exit.

"The Mayans, the Egyptians, even the Bible. We wonder why they're obsessed with the stars, why they build monuments in correlation to them. They were trying to tell us that they'd be back; they were trying to warn us. The Codex talks about the 'Lords of the Stars' arriving at the end of the galactic day. It says literally, 'Woe to you people of the earth. The end of the Jaguar knights will come together with the beginning of a new era that will rise from the ashes of the previous. It will be the time of the encounter with the Lords of the Stars.'

"The Egyptians made us a map to show us where they came from. The pyramids at Giza are the trinity-the stars in Orion's belt. Heliopolis is the constellation Leo. The pyramids at Abusir are the Pleiades. The pyramids at Giza and Dahshur are in three distinct colors: red, white, and black. Three. Three deities.

"The Sumerian writings speak of the Din Gir, the 'gods traveling on celestial ships of fire.' Even the Bible talks of the second coming of Jesus, ushering in the last battle and the end of humanity, and a trinity of three gods acting as one."

She rounded on him as they reached ground level and the side door they had used to enter.

"You are certifiable."

"This is what Mulder was after, but it's incomplete. There's something missing. We've got to get to South America."

Incredulity didn't quite encompass the magnitude of her expression as she pulled the stairwell door open.

"Sorry, Jeff. Field trip's over."

She froze as the rumble of Alex Krycek's voice washed over her. Her fist was halfway to connecting with the solidness of his jaw before she even started processing what his appearance might mean. Spender, quicker than she ever realized, pulled her arm back.

Krycek narrowed his eyes at the transaction, but otherwise remained still.

"Our Ibis has started vaccinations. If you're not out of the country today, you'll find yourself swimming back to the States."

"We've got another month before she even-"

"There were three outbreaks of Ebola just this week."

She felt her face pull into a frown. It seemed Scully was ahead of schedule. The introduction of several new strains of virus would lead to a worldwide scare. The panic and fear of contagion would lead to an outcry for vaccination, although what the public would not know was they would be receiving a vaccination for an alien virus in place of Scully's test tube strains of Ebola, Hantavirus and West Nile.

The panic and fear part of that equation, not to mention probable quarantines, would most likely strand them on the continent.

An errant thought sparked in her mind and she turned her head to look at the man with his hand still lightly encircling the crook of her arm.

"Are you?"

Spender's brow furrowed in confusion. Alex reached over and emptied a syringe of amber liquid into Spender's arm while they were distracted.

"He is now."

Spender yelped and fell back a couple of paces. He rubbed the spot with an open palm.

"Thanks, I think."

"Don't mention it. Now, get your ass on a plane. There's work to be done."

* * *

**A/N:** I apologize for the delay, but I hope three chapters made up for it. I've written myself into a tiny corner with the next section, but hopefully I'll figure it out if I don't get distracted in the meantime. In any event, cheers and thanks for reading.


	15. 15 Reyes

She stood at the foot of the pyramid, backlit by the glow of the sunset, lost in thought.

What would it have been like to be one of the captured Spanish conquistadors? ascending such a great structure, the steps slick with steadily growing rivers of blood, bound in a line climbing toward fate. At the summit, a priest dressed in wealth and death, gold and bone, wields an obsidian knife. She wondered faintly if the priests were fast enough, if the heart could be removed so quickly that the human sacrifice would see it, dripping crimson onto the flagstones. She wondered how many steps he would fall before succumbing. She wondered if he could make it to the pile of bodies at the base of the temple before losing consciousness.

Knocking her elbow every other step, Gage crowded her as they made their way through the packs of gawkers snapping askew photos of the pyramid silhouetted in rusted light. He looked ridiculous in a bright red and orange Hawaiian shirt, a camera around his neck and a straw hat atop his head. Jacob looked less out of place in tattered cutoffs and an open blue button down.

Gage had pulled them away from the translation and back to tourist-packed civilization earlier than she anticipated, but he said the first stage of the inoculation process was going ahead and if they wanted to make it back to the US, they'd have to move quickly.

They'd translated only two-thirds of the temple, but so far hadn't found the specific prophesy Mulder had been sure was there. She'd stared at the text so long sometimes the paint seemed to glow brighter. She could almost see it as it was when it was first scribed and brushed with color. Impressions of small truths kept niggling at the back of her mind, like barely-remembered dreams or lost memories. Images of a blood red sun, a blindingly white moon and a dark serpent whispered through her reveries like the condensation that teased her skin. Words and connotations came increasingly easily to her as she doggedly plugged through the frescos.

Meanwhile the rest of her was just plain frustrated.

Constant dissatisfaction would do that to a person.

The heat, the bugs, the squatting. The lack of hygiene, the smell of sweltering earth, the howls of feral creatures. Restless sleep, iodine-treated, lukewarm water, dehydrated food. The goddamn jungle. And not even a companion to complain to. She sneered as she remembered Jacob's shrug and casual dismissal of her tirade of grievances.

She hadn't spoken a word for three days after that.

Neither of them noticed.

She spent her nights silently simmering and wondering how Scully did it.

The loyalty Scully inspired seemed frighteningly close to fanaticism. She more often roused lust than devotion. The looks she received were leering and tempered with lechery, nothing like the apt and eager gazes she saw directed at Scully. She wondered how to put such a high price on her approval, if it could be learned, bottled and sold.

It couldn't be purely physical. Scully was no Helen of Troy, no more than she herself was. They were too old with too many scars. It couldn't be an attraction in the normal way. Scully was inapproachable at best and definitively unattainable, her confidence tailor-made by the FBI to be aloof and asexual. It couldn't even be the unfaltering commitment to an absurd partner. Most of the men had never even met Mulder, let alone seen Mulder and Scully in the same room.

Maybe it was the ideas themselves, the proffer of a quest, a prize worth dying for. Honor. It was a seductive notion as far as soldiers were concerned. Maybe it was powerful enough to hold them, but she thought it was more the hook.

She supposed Scully's persona would be captivating enough, if anyone could ever penetrate that armor. A childless mother, Scully appointed herself the steward of humanity.

Everloving martyrs.

She felt her temperature spike, her pique ignited so easily, but something was different. Every sense was heightened, explicit, and she felt on the verge of some revelation, the same sensation that had been prickling against her consciousness before in the temple. She swayed as the rising moon shifted into a blazing sun. Gage appeared at her arm, clutching her elbow and trying to steer her toward a bench left vacant by dissipating sightseers. She jerked away from him, intuitively convinced of the importance of this particular moment in time, and stared at the moon again until it morphed into a sun.

The landscape transformed. Benches and asphalt disappeared, becoming beautiful stone streets and carved statues. An entire city appeared in the landscape around her, the vacationeers and peddlers becoming bone-adorned natives. She could feel the midday heat rising off the limestone buildings, hear the crunching of maize under an old woman's pestle, smell the traffic of the market goods.

The Kukulcan rose above her, fiercer and sharper, unweathered, new and radiant. Painted serpents smiled at her from every surface. Pillars and temple avenues gleamed brilliantly from every direction while crowds of people moved about their business.

A priest draped in a blood red cloth, gold and vermeil jewelry flashing in the sun, caught her eye as he descended the Castillo's steps. His nose was slit and his earlobes drooped from years of donning heavy earrings. He carried a walking staff, dripping with glittering jewels and topped with a carved jade skull. She drifted after him, following the clinking of his golden ankle bracelets.

A wide, alabaster stone road led away from the pyramid. She wandered passed the Jaguar temple and the raised Venus Platform. Landscaped areas held exotic flowers and leafy trees. She trailed the priest passed the Tzompantli, skulls slowly drying in the heat, and through the city wall. She found herself staring into the emerald depths of a cenote. A small waterhouse stood beside her, occupied with the tools of water distribution, while offerings lined the perimeter.

The priest turned and smiled at her, revealing gold-flecked teeth. She whipped her head around, but none of the surrounding people were looking at them. She turned back to face him.

He grinned again, sweeping a creased hand out to encompass the cenote, white limestone walls shimmering with moving light reflected off the water's surface.

"Go," the vision echoed around her with an ancient presence.

She took a deep breath and dove into the water.

Legend held that the bottom of the Sacred Cenote was one of three entrances to Xibalba, the death place. She hoped that wasn't true for her in particular as the chilled groundwater slipped over her skin. Her lungs began to burn and her eyes stung, visibility almost zero in the murky depths. She struggled, panic rising in her chest. She twisted, searching for the surface, but she couldn't tell which way it was. Pain lanced through her lungs and she inhaled, the sacred water filling her.

A current swept around her, pulling her even deeper into the well. She found herself wondering if it was possible to die in a vision before everything went black.

She woke, coughing and sputtering, on an uneven rock floor. There was no light, but a great limestone column that seemed to produce it's own luminance rose from the center of the floor and into the ceiling of a cave.

"Balankanche," she whispered in reverence. Masses of stalactites and stalagmites combined over the centuries to create an elegant work of art: a large limestone mass that almost resembled a sweeping tree. Hundreds of overlapping stalactites were so similar to leaves she swore she could almost see them moving in the cool drafts biting her soaked skin, while the column itself was rough with sediment like bark. Rounded stalagmites rose to meet the base of the column and tapered off to the floor, bearing an uncanny similarity to knobby roots.

The pillar radiated at the sound of her voice, a faint glow appearing in one of the tunnels leading away from the main chamber. She coughed once more and picked her way toward the light.

The passage seemed to go on and on. Running her fingers along the cave wall, slick with groundwater seepage, she guided herself through the meandering tunnel. Suddenly, the glow disappeared and she was plunged into true darkness. She stumbled, her hands striking a rock wall and breaking through it. She winced as she felt stone pierce her hands and blood trickle down her palms. The scratches didn't feel deep and thankfully missed her wrists.

She peered into the hole punched into the stone, a light spilling from the chamber. She stripped her outer button down shirt off and wrapped it around her hand. Wary of more injury, she slowly began to punch, pull and kick a bigger opening into the tunnel wall. Finally she cleared a hole large enough to allow her entry into the chamber.

The unnaturally smooth walls of the chamber shimmered with light reflecting off of calcite crystals. An obsidian altar stood at the center of the room. The rock looked cut with laser precision and the glassy surface seemed to dance and swirl with arcing light.

The source of illumination was a golden disk seated atop the altar. It pulsed with an otherworldly, almost divine, glow. The gold was worked into eerie shapes. Serpents ran the perimeter. Disjointed writings, symbols for water, life and death caught her eye, as well as the symbols for finality and eternity confusingly intertwined. Depictions of planets and celestial bodies blazed as precious stones winking from their gilded settings. Embedded into the center of the disk was a black orb, absorbing the light given off by the gold. She felt as though the inky orb was blackness itself, that no other incarnation she'd ever seen would compare. She reached out a hand, laying just the tip of her finger against the place where the gold met the black stone.

A blindingly white light flared and she felt a burning at the base of her neck. She ripped the simple ball chain of a necklace from beneath her undershirt. It felt hot even in her hand. She opened her fist to find the pendant had turned to dust.

Fear overtook her.

Magnetite in its undiluted form was extremely rare. To her knowledge, only a few deposits existed in the purity requisite to react with the composition of a super soldier. Scully wore a bracelet of magnetite, while Marita, Krycek and Mulder carried three bullets each with exploding magnetite cores. She had her piece fashioned into a necklace.

Which now resembled fine ash.

This place was never meant to be found, she realized. This artifact could be the destruction of their only defense against an unstoppable army, could destroy the scant deposits of the rare metal. The Mayans hid it under the ground and sealed the entrance, leaving it guarded by their gods. Even the disk, etched with their most powerful incarnations, was protection against whatever composed the black orb.

She hesitated. If she took it with her, there was no telling who could find out what it did and the havoc it could cause. If she left it, someone else could stumble upon it.

The risk of accidental exposure was too great. She wrapped it in her shirt and lifted it from the altar. As the artifact left the base, the room spun. Water crashed all around her, buffeting her and filling her nose and mouth for the second time that day. She kicked and extended her arms, but she reached nothing but water.

After endless moments, large hands wrapped themselves around her arms and lifted her free of the torrent.

Choking and drawing ragged breaths, she looked up into the leaden eyes of Jacob Blackley.

Gage half dragged, half carried her to a nearby shuttle bus stop bench. A few tourists were still loitering around the site and watched her with offended interest. Apparently it was bad form to jump into an exhibit. Gage removed his shirt and put it around her shoulders, his hand uncharacteristically drawing comforting circles on her back. Jacob trailed them carefully, scanning faces for guards.

She felt the gilded disk still encased in her shirt and clutched against her chest. Her teeth chattered despite the humid night.

"We have to get back," she shivered closer to Gage. The old soldier watched her, questions flying across his expression. "I - I think they led me to it."

"To what?"

She could feel the presence of the red priest, the ghosts of the ancients. A wind rippled through Gage's shirt, brushing her cheek with a compassionate knowledge.

"Everything," she breathed.

* * *

**A/N:** The basic research for this scene is sound. Chichen Itza does exist in this layout. The locations that appear in this chapter are real, although it would probably be a bad idea to site any of this in a research report. By way of information, there was at least one secret chamber found in 1957 in the Balankanche Caves, hidden behind a false wall.

I did, however, take considerable creative liberties with the existence of magnetite. It is actually fairly common, although in pure forms it is somewhat more difficult to find. Found in black beach sand or veins of iron, it is the most magnetic of the naturally occurring minerals. It has a fair few commercial uses, particularly in magnetic storage, and can be created with some ease in a laboratory setting. But let's just pretend that super soldiers are only susceptible to a particular and undiluted magnetite compound. -_- I will be looking into the chemical reactions of these compounds, but if anyone happens to have some particular insight, or is a chemist, I would welcome and encourage a dialogue. Thanks. ^_^


	16. 16 Marshall

The cloud of energy around Scully pulsed and crackled with its intensity, a dark miasma of years of practiced rage. He was keeping a ten-foot perimeter while the rest of the hospital staff was steadily avoiding the whole floor. It was probably better, considering the two parties en route, but the desertion heightened the ominous feeling in the air to an almost unbearable level. The two four-man contingents of guards he stationed as security for the meeting were fidgeting around their triggers, images of devastating explosions and mushroom clouds playing in their eyes. If someone dropped a clipboard at the wrong time, he feared the outcome.

He half expected Colleen to scrounge up a collection of incense and a dozen crystals, and start an exorcism or a cleansing, but even the new ager was maintaing her distance, except for quickly replacing the herbal calming tea at Scully's elbow.

Not that she was drinking it. It was his opinion that Scully was now living exclusively on the electricity generated in her cumulonimbus aura. To his knowledge, she hadn't eaten or slept in two days. She spent most of her time pacing and staring at the maps and stats on her tablet until they were forever imbedded into her gray matter. She had tried to send him away for an hour so she could lock herself in her office and likely scream herself hoarse into a hideous ecru throw pillow, but he'd taken her to the physical therapy room instead and made her run hand-to-hand drills in the hopes she would wear herself out before she ended up harming herself or someone else.

No such luck.

The Snake and his rebel alien delegation were due to arrive at any time. Their sudden reversal in the decision to cooperate with Scully's resistance was suspicious, but Skinner was no fool and had asked all the right questions. And so far received all the right responses. So under his recommendation, they negotiated a meeting.

Martin, the junior tech-head, spent the better part of the week in conference with the Gunmen in order to set up the necessary jamming equipment. Any targeting or locating devices would be useless while in the radius of the city. Unfortunately, they would also end up knocking out all cel phones, satellite feeds and other wireless machines in the county for about an hour. It was an exposure risk, but it was better than letting some aliens zap them from space. As an extra precaution, they were holding the meeting at the hospital instead of Scully's true base of operations. However, if they did end up laser-dusted, he was slightly consoled by the fact that he wouldn't have to see the world a man like Alex Krycek would build.

The rebels might be in for a surprise if Skinner ended up arriving before Mulder, Gibson Praise and their escorts. Scully had enough on her mind without the added task of being diplomatic. If she didn't let off some steam, the rebels could wind up more worried about the wrath of a red-headed human than Purity-controlled aliens.

He just hoped the whole ordeal wouldn't last very long. They were already a week late for relocation to the base, strategic virus outbreaks were in progress and they needed to assess the coordination of the final vaccination plans being executed by their operatives around the country, not to mention check up on the international ones. Henderson seemed assured of Doggett's competence, but Marshall wanted an outline of the battle strategies, not to mention immunity for Scully's movement back to the US, before he would sign off.

"Sir." Danner's voice cracked through the radio.

Marshall saw Scully flinch and listen with every fiber of herself from across the room.

"Alopex cleared."

He sighed. Out of relief or exasperation, he couldn't be sure. Well, Mulder was human and in the building. He shook himself loose as Scully bolted for the door and launched herself into the hallway. He found her just outside the doorway, standing stock still and staring at the elevator as it rumbled to a stop at the end of the hall.

Four armed soldiers led by former Major Wood of the USAF stood guard in the hallway as Mulder and Gibson, flanked by Rosen and Howell, made their way toward them. Scully took two steps forward, but stopped as Mulder started to grin. She cocked her head in warning, but Mulder ignored it. He walked right into the storm cloud everyone else was avoiding like a particularly infectious disease and pressed his lips to hers. There was an awkward moment as she tried to argue, the words caught in his throat, but it quickly subsided. Wood's men were all staring in various degrees of shock, stunned that she hadn't put him on his ass, and too surprised to avert their eyes until her arms reached up and encircled Mulder's neck.

He wasn't as disquieted as the rest of the hall, but he thought it must be akin to seeing the feat of Moses parting the Red Sea. Her rigid demeanor had given them all to forget her gender and assume her devoid of stereotypical sentiment. He gazed at the linoleum and contemplated clearing his throat to remind her of the rebel delegation's imminent arrival.

The scraping of a sidearm against a holster and the click of a safety release roared through the embarrassed silence.

Marshall had his own weapon out before he finished scanning the area, searching for everything from aliens to black bears.

Gibson had his Smith and Wesson trained on Mulder and Scully. They were engaged in some sort of gauche dance, both trying to be the one in front of the barrel. Mulder was winning by sheer size.

"Gibson, what are you doing?" Mulder demanded.

"She's not what you think she is, Mulder," the young man insisted, trying to aim around him.

Marshall saw a flicker of recognition in Scully's eye as everyone turned to look at her. Wood's men as well as Rosen and Howell finally took up their own guns, but seemed momentarily unsure of where to point them.

"Gibson," she put up a placating palm, the other anchored to Mulder's forearm. The former agent's gaze raked over every inch of her face.

"Don't!" the boy yelled, swinging a second handgun toward Wood who moved into his blind spot.

"Gibson buddy, I think you-"

"Mulder, she's not-"

"Put your weapons down." Her order was cool and slick, brushing through the tension in the air, almost cleansing it.

Marshall shifted to keep both Gibson and Scully in his sight. Where before there had been a haze of unbridled emotion, her attitude shifted into complete competence and resolve. Nothing about her indicated her internal dialogue. Her expression gave no symptom of even being aware there was a bullet aimed at her head. Slowly, he took his finger off the trigger and lowered the handgun to the floor. The rest of the men followed suit.

"Gibson, I think you've got it wrong. Don't you think I'd know if this wasn't Scully?"

"Mulder I can't-"

"You can't read my mind, can you?"

Marshall sighed as he realized what happened. He guessed it was his fault for not informing the little psychic what to expect.

Scully never broke eye contact with Gibson. She took cautious steps around the boy and opened the door to the conference room. "Please. I'll explain everything."

Marshall took his cue and led the way, Mulder on his tail a beat later. Scully followed and seated herself at the head of the long table. Gibson shuffled in, jumping slightly when one of the men outside closed the door behind him.

"The reason you can't hear what I'm thinking is the result of a failed experiment," she began. "As you probably know from meeting Marshall here and Henderson, the man with General Doggett, I've a very few telepaths in my employ."

Mulder made a choking sound and frowned at Marshall.

"Their telepathic abilities, along with enhanced physical ones, are the product of decades of Soviet research into creating what we know as super soldiers. The research was incomplete. Marshall and his hundred or so peers are not indestructible. They are not susceptible to magnetite compounds."

She unclasped her bracelet and threw it at him. He caught it and held it out in his palm for Gibson to see.

"They are, however, limitedly telepathic. They can communicate in qualified images and impressions with the other men involved in the same tests. It's nothing compared to your ability. They cannot send specific data or thoughts and they cannot communicate with ordinary people.

"After I discovered the research, I attempted to duplicate the process on myself." She stiffened. "It failed."

Mulder inhaled sharply, but was otherwise silent.

"The inadvertent result was a slight shift in the electromagnetic impulses generated by the neurons in my brain, which is likely why you're unable to sense them. We're no longer on the same wavelength." She quirked a small smile.

"Scully, you've been holding out on me," Mulder pouted in the resulting silence.

She rounded on him in a whorl of subtly amused irritation. It bore no resemblance to her earlier storm of ire, although Marshall rather thought Mulder hadn't avoided his fate, only delayed it.

"Oh, you want to go there, Mulder? Why don't we talk about why I had to have you dragged here by your ear."

"You know I come when you call, Scully."

"We'll talk about testing your Pavlovian responses later."

"Stop it! Stop it! Fine, enough. I believe you. Just . . . cut it out," Gibson gagged. "Disgusting."

For the first time in days, she physically relaxed. She stretched out against the faux-leather of the high-backed swivel chair, her vertebrae popping inaudibly, and settled her hands in her lap. Mulder, maybe as in tune with her probable state of mind as Marshall, placed a package of complementary airplane biscuits in front of her.

She shook her head. "No time. Skinner's on his way with someone you're not going to believe."

"Skinman's bringing a date to my homecoming party? I'm touched."

"Don't be. It's an alien."

Mulder snorted and contemplated her with a gentle reverence. "How'd our lives get this way, Scully?"

"I blame you," she sighed, her eyes slipping shut. 


	17. 17 Spender

***Warning***  
There is a half a second of possible incest, but only if you believe CSM is the biological father of Samantha Mulder. The mytharc, along with the relative appearances of the actors, makes it entirely possible, but never substantiated.

* * *

Their burgeoning repartee faltered into silence somewhere outside city limits. The night grew colder even as color started to return to the horizon. He watched as she pursed her lips and stole glances at him in the window's reflection.

It was never supposed to be this way.

The last girl to make him feel like a child was Samantha Mossgrove, a child herself. Quiet and shy with a brilliant smile that seemed to have fallen out of practice, they placed their hands together in the wet concrete and traced their names below the impressions. He remembered laughing and threatening impossible things when she swiped her finger across his nose, leaving a streak of gray paste. He wondered if the imprints were still there, or if someone had come and repaved since all those summers ago, since his mother reappeared with her stories and moved them away, since he fell out of touch with the little lost girl from across the street.

But he was too many years from the corner of Albatross and Cline, too many women and revelations and injuries away to feel like that again. So he stared out into the sunrise and pretended not to notice the feminine irritation from the other side of the car.

The trajectory of his life after his few happy years on April Air Force Base seemed to be uniformly downtrending. His mother returned broken, the remainder of his childhood lost to easing her suffering and trying to rationalize her insanity, first to himself and then to others. Circumstantially antisocial and uniformly shunned, he drifted through the rest of his adolescence in obscurity until the FBI program came calling. The Justice Department sought him out, but not for the reasons he believed. His average grades, average intelligence, average abilities were of no consequence, but his name, his heritage gained him these fickle allies. He worked hard, content within his ignorance, within the lie, until Fox Mulder.

His brother, the child his parents would rather have had, burst into his world and merrily tramped all over the scrap of pride he held for his work with accusations as preposterous as his mother's. Mulder looked him in the eye and demanded he be better, that he believe and make a choice. And the worst part, the part that really ate at him in those long days spent in that military hospital, spent as a disposable, nameless guinea pig, was that Mulder had always been on the right side.

He stowed those feelings, kept them safe with the hatred of his father and disappointment in his government, and withdrew them from time to time, for situations like keeping himself alive in a stinking Singapore prison, like accepting his deformities and their consequences.

But to have something to fight for, someone worth fighting for, instead of things to fight against, that was what his brother had that he did not. They both of them inherited this battle, decades in the making. The sins of the father thrust upon the sons. A legacy of lies.

He thought about Marita, about Scully and Bill Mulder, about all the resistance players who stayed under an intangible obligation, because of adherence to moral responsibilities in their own consciouses. He thought about all of those people who once had a choice. He thought about the character it would take to say yes without the vengeance that drove him.

Would he have walked away? if his father hadn't been a shadowy conspirator, if his mother hadn't been Patient Zero? If he wasn't bound by blood and loathing?

He thought about Alex Krycek, the man who chose a side before he knew it was a war. He thought about Diana Fowley, the woman who gave her life to an allegiance of love. He thought about Walter Skinner, the old soldier who found one last mission.

He eyed Marita, watched her clipped motions as she pulled onto the airport exit.

The choice to help Mulder all those years ago was more telling than the choice to join Scully's resistance. It was his belief that no one joined the UN because she or he wanted to screw over the world. That kind of career path suggested she was once a bright-eyed idealist, her decision to help Mulder the result of the eventual bureaucratic disillusionment and disgust.

The first time he saw her, clad in blue scrubs and nervous tremors, she bore such a striking resemblance to his mother that he'd been taken in by her distress before he understood that she was part of the game, before he realized she'd tried to play both sides of the field and lost, a motif that would repeat itself in his partner. Everyone around him kept telling him and he just never accepted it: He would never be as good as Fox Mulder.

Well, he knew now.

And it was time to save Fox Mulder from himself.

He fiddled with his new prostheses under the brim of his hat and eyed the cameras warily as they passed through the airport's sliding glass doors. A blast of climate controlled air brushed against his face and he struggled to get a grip on his resolve.

Marita stopped him with a touch on his arm in front of the customer service queue. A bleary-eyed business man shouldered passed him into the line, grumbling and yawning.

"You're not coming with me, are you?"

He kept his head down, drawing circles on the tile with his shoe.

She sighed, her gaze casting around the white expanse of silver counters and blue dividing ribbons strung between waist-high posts without landing on anything in particular. After a few moments, she settled back on him. "Why?"

Of all the answers to that question, he was about to give the least personal, the one that wouldn't hurt. He just hoped she wouldn't discern the others. He pulled her over to a set of mettle benches opposite a blaring Delta International emblem.

"Mulder-"

"Has to hear your crazy-ass theory. I know."

"That's not all of it."

"Then what?"

He touched a hand to his forehead in order to avoid her searching look. "I'm afraid he won't - I'm afraid he'll let his emotions get in the way of doing what needs to be done."

"You mean William?"

He nodded.

She turned away, studying their surroundings. He could almost feel her coming to the conclusions she needed, almost touch her desire to do what she wanted warring with her sense of duty. Her role in the resistance was important; her conscious wouldn't let her make the wrong decision.

Finally she shook herself out of her thoughts. "Scully is going to kill you, you know. Personally. Intimately."

"Not if the aliens get me first," he quirked his thin lips in a self-depreciating arc and chanced a look into her eyes. Her tender expression caught him off-guard and he stumbled.

Really, saving the world sucked.

They purchased their tickets, hers for Hong Kong and his for JKF. He walked her to Concourse B and refrained from touching her hand at Gate 21.

She halted before the jetway door.

"Marita, after this is all over - if we make it - I mean-"

"You better fucking survive," she deadpanned.

He chuffed, surprised, and tried again. "I just mean - what I'm trying to say is -"

She shook her head and removed a ring from her finger. A gold band set off a trio of small sapphires the color of the rim of her irises. Blue and gold, the colors of her life force. She placed it in his hand.

"I'll find you," she said simply.

He clutched the band, feeling it leaving an impression in his skin, and watched her as she handed her ticket to the attendant and started down the empty jetway without looking back.

Maybe he had something worth fighting for, after all.


End file.
